Singapore reportedly paid the singer £2.4m a show to host her Eras tour, causing dismay in Thailand and the Philippines

Congratulations are in order for Taylor Swift, who makes her Forbes Rich List debut this year as one of the world’s newly minted billionaires . Not content with inspiring her own branch of economics – Swiftonomics, FYI – the singer is also responsible for causing geopolitical tension in south-east Asia, with her record-busting Eras tour.

The financial value of a Swift gig is of such national importance that Singapore reportedly paid her up to $3m (£2.4m) a show to ensure it was the only place to host Swift on her jaunt to the region this spring, prompting complaints from Thailand and the Philippines. In the words of one Filipino politician: “[It] isn’t what good neighbours do.” If $3m sounds like an awful lot to secure a concert exclusive, that’s small change when you consider the benefits – it’s estimated that her six shows have boosted the Singapore economy by $370m .

Pop promos were once cultural events almost as important as the music they promoted. In an era of easily digestible bite-size content, the art form is in danger of being lost for ever

In increasingly turbulent times for the music industry, one aspect has remained steadfast: its passion for stats. At the start of the decade – with YouTube a strong metric of success after the collapse of CD sales – you couldn’t move for mind-bending figures being trumpeted about music video viewership. In 2021, for example, K-pop boyband BTS’s Butter video amassed a staggering 108m views in 24 hours, breaking a record that appeared to be eclipsed on a weekly basis. Butter now sits on a not-too-shabby 950m views, a figure dwarfed by Katy Perry’s jungle-based Roar (3.9bn), Mark Ronson’s retro fantasia Uptown Funk (5.1bn) and Luis Fonsi’s Justin Bieber-assisted 2017 smash, Despacito , which has 8.4bn views.

The two dominant global forces in recent years have been K-pop and Latin music, and their big-budget music videos still rule the roost (Shakira and the Colombian singer Karol G’s TQG video was viewed more than a billion times last year). For Anglo-American pop in 2024, however, a seismic shift has occurred: music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing videos altogether and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they previously dominated.

The singer, who is known for her attempts to run her career sustainably, likened the practice to The Hunger Games – playing a game to get fans to keep buying more

Billie Eilish has criticised the practice of musicians releasing several vinyl variants of the same record in order to drive sales and earn “them more money”, likening it to The Hunger Games franchise: “We’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game.”

“I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is,” Eilish , 22, told Billboard in an interview about her push to run her career in a sustainable and less environmentally impactful way.

Enlarge / Taylor Swift during her Eras Tour. Crowd motions likely caused mini "Swift quakes" recorded by seismic monitoring stations. (credit: Ronald Woan/CC BY-SA 2.0 )

When mega pop star Taylor Swift gave a series of concerts last August at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, regional seismic network stations recorded unique harmonic vibrations known as "concert tremor." A similar "Swift quake" had occurred the month before in Seattle, prompting scientists from the California Institute of Technology and UCLA to take a closer look at seismic data collected during Swift's LA concert.

The researchers concluded that the vibrations were largely generated by crowd motion as "Swifties" jumped and danced enthusiastically to the music and described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Seismological Research Letters. The authors contend that gaining a better understanding of atypical seismic signals like those generated by the Swift concert could improve the analysis of seismic signals in the future, as well as bolster emerging applications like using signals from train noise for seismic interferometry .

Concert tremor consists of low-frequency signals of extended duration with harmonic frequency peaks between 1 and 10 Hz, similar to the signals generated by volcanoes or trains. There has been considerable debate about the source of these low-frequency concert tremor signals: Are they produced by the synchronized movement of the crowd, or by the sound systems or instruments coupled to the stage? Several prior studies of stadium concerts have argued for the former hypothesis, while a 2015 study found that a chanting crowd at a football game produced similar harmonic seismic tremors. However, a 2008 study concluded that such signals generated during an outdoor electronic dance music festival came from the sound system vibrating to the musical beat.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ariana Grande, SZA and Kacey Musgraves are just a few of the musicians to invoke astral powers in their songs. It’s a reach for relatability – but what does it mean for songwriting?

Seven years ago, I was flicking through a magazine at the hairdresser’s when I came to my horoscope. My eye was caught by a line informing me and my fellow Pisceans that we were in the final stretch of a punishing three-year visit from Saturn, the “taskmaster planet”, but pretty soon everything was going to be fine. It sounds anodyne – but I needed to hear it. I was 25 and mired in my first real heartbreak, two years into an overseas move and uncertain of whether to stick it out. Elle magazine’s 2017 Astro Guide might not have been authoritative, but it did make me feel more optimistic about the future.

It was my first encounter with the theory of the Saturn return: that in the 29-ish years it takes Saturn to orbit the sun from the point of our birth, a confronting initiation into adulthood ensues. It’s a revelation that’s hit pop recently. Ariana Grande included a 42-second spoken-word explainer from astrologer Diana Garland on her new album Eternal Sunshine. On new single Saturn, SZA expresses weariness with her self-destructive behaviours and yearns to channel the consistency and discipline associated with the planet: “Life’s better on Saturn / Got to break this pattern / Of floating away.” Kacey Musgraves begins Deeper Well, the title track of her new album, by declaring “my Saturn has returned”. (The same phrase is also emblazoned on sweatshirts, selling for $60 on her online store.)

Bonne nouvelle pour tous les Swifties : le concert monumental de la star américaine, The Eras Tour, sera disponible très bientôt en streaming. Des surprises sont même au programme.

Taylor Swift has taken a step back from politics since endorsing Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Could she come back into the fold for Biden?

After weeks of maddening speculation over whom Taylor Swift might support in the 2024 US presidential elections, the venerated pop star finally revealed her endorsement: the right to vote itself.

“Vote the people who most represent YOU into power,” Swift urged fans in an Instagram story amid Super Tuesday ’ s primary elections, perhaps the last chance to stop Donald Trump from once again seizing the Republican nomination for president.

Emma Stone is delightfully disconcerting in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar contender, and Tay Tay’s smash-hit concert film can sparkle its way into your home at last

​Universal’s decision to remove its artists from ​T​ikTok ​h​as destabilised both companies – and lays bare how record labels have become reliant on random virality

Earlier this month, the music industry was hit with its biggest shake-up in years when Universal Music Group announced that it would be pulling the entirety of its catalogue – which covers everyone from K-pop stars BTS to Taylor Swift and legacy acts such as Abba – from TikTok .

In an open letter, UMG said the decision was made in protest at the platform’s low compensation rates, lack of protections around AI deepfakes and low safety standards for TikTok users. Universal also alleged that TikTok tried to “intimidate” the label by “selectively removing the music of … our developing artists, while keeping on the platform our audience-driving global stars”. TikTok’s brief response decried UMG’s “false narrative and rhetoric”.